![Parents feed children in FBT Kitten Collage [image description: collage of kittens being bottle-fed]](https://eatingdisordertherapyla.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Parents-feed-children-in-FBT-Kitten-Collage.png)
I recently began volunteering at the Best Friends Neonatal Kitten Nursery. Best Friends Los Angeles opened its neonatal kitten nursery in February 2013. The nursery is staffed with a dedicated coordinator and supported by volunteers who sign up for two hour feeding shifts 24 hours a day to help the kittens grow and thrive.
If you were an abandoned kitten in the Los Angeles area, or even a kitten with a mother, you’d be lucky to make your way to the Best Friends Neonatal Kitten Nursery.
The most vulnerable animals in the Los Angeles shelters are newborn kittens, often abandoned at birth, or turned into shelters from accidental litters. Because the kittens cannot feed themselves, they will die without someone to bottle feed them.
In the mommy and me section of the nursery, mothers nurse their kittens. In the other sections, kittens are bottle-fed, tube-fed, or syringe-fed until they are able to eat gruel on their own. Kittens are weighed before and after each feeding. If their weights are not steadily going up, the interventions increase. They are very fragile at this age.
The other night, the nursery coordinator, Nicole, was tube-feeding some kittens who were ill. As she explained, they were feeling too sick to eat on their own. Although acknowledging that her tube feeding was making them angry, Nicole was resolute. No kitten would starve to death on her watch. Of course, I connected this back to my families working to re-feed their children with anorexia.
In the neonatal nursery, we don’t spend time thinking about why the kitten is not nursing or eating in the expected fashion. If they are sick, they are treated for that, but in the meantime, every kitten is fed around the clock and those who don’t have mothers are bottle fed, those who won’t nurse from their mothers (often when they are too congested) are tube-fed, and those who won’t eat gruel independently are syringe-fed.
How does this relate to parents doing Family Based Treatment (FBT) for Eating Disorders with children who have Anorexia?
Of course, parents do not literally force food down human children’s throats, but they do set up contingencies to require eating even if the child doesn’t feel well and even if they rail and resist and are angry about it.
This is the heart of FBT Phase 1. When children are not able to eat on their own (due to an eating disorder) parents are instructed to nourish their starving child back to health. Parents need to step in and help their children make steady weight gains until they are able to eat on their own. Parents need to be resolute and not worry about their children being angry at them. They also should not spend time exploring why their child is not eating.
For further information on parental direction over eating in FBT, check out this prior blog post.